The first computer hard drive ever shipped had a capacity of five megabytes. Now, thousands and thousands of megabytes of data are being generated every day. Everything from text to pictures to videos is being stored to storage drives, often remotely via the cloud. A website that allows users to upload media must store vast amounts of data in servers. This storage burden is further increased by the fact that many organizations create and store duplicate copies of code and data for disaster-recovery, testing, regulatory, or other purposes. Some organizations outsource this responsibility while other organizations manage their own data centers full of servers and storage devices.
Fortunately, storage technology is keeping pace with the demand for storage space, at least for now. New servers and storage drives are released on a regular basis to store and retrieve data more efficiently. Unfortunately, these new devices are often incompatible with older hardware. Some new devices may even be incompatible with older infrastructure such as server racks if the form factor of the new device is significantly different from its predecessor. An improvement to the devices used to house media storage devices can create a tremendous improvement in efficiency for data center operators.